‘Oh . . . Still . . . It’s not my . . . But anyway, it isn’t fair, Grandad! On you, I mean. You aren’t well. You’re . . . Do you want to go?’
He put the ghost fingers against the real ones and cocked his head to one side.
‘I have asked myself that often,’ he said. ‘The answer is, I don’t know. I should of course prefer to die in Varina – remember that, my darling, if it should happen. That apart, the question is unimportant, trivial. If I have the opportunity and refuse it, what will have been the point of my life? What will have been the point of my bearing the name I bear? You see?’
‘No. No I don’t. Whatever happens, you’re you. Whatever you’re called. There isn’t anyone else like you and there never will be. Oh, please . . . I’m not allowed to say that, am I? I’m supposed to say “If you must go, then you must go.” But I won’t. I won’t!’
He was looking at her, nodding his head, considering.
‘You do forbid me, then?’ he said.
‘No, it isn’t like that. I’ve told you, I can’t.’
‘You could, and if you did I think . . . I think I would stay. Remember that I am not sure that even if I were allowed to go I could achieve anything. I am old. I am tired. It is very likely too late. I am telling you the truth, my darling. I do not know.’
He started to take his pills, one at a time, with sips of water between. Letta watched him. His hand quivered as he lifted the glass. A moment ago he had been full of energy, but now he looked as frail as a fallen leaf. What could one old man do?
The window was open and the curtains drawn. The town lights glowed below, and glowed again from the cloud-base above. Somebody was having a party a couple of streets down the hill. There were whoops and cheering. The noise reminded Letta of sitting with her back against the sun-warmed wall of ruined St Valia’s, listening to the noise of Potok rejoicing in the festival, and that in turn reminded her of the picture, almost like a vision, she had seen in her mind when she was sitting with Biddie in Richoux, the war-planes screaming between the mountains, the stampeding crowd in the square, Parvla falling under their feet . . . It wasn’t anything to do with what she wanted, she realized, or with what Grandad himself wanted, for himself. Perhaps he could make the difference. And if he couldn’t, then no-one could.
‘I think you’re sort of fixed,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to go if they’ll let you, haven’t you?’
‘I’m afraid so, my darling.’
LEGEND
Restaur Vax and the Bishop: II
THE PRINCES OF the World came to Potok to see Bishop Pango enthroned Prince of Varina, and there was a great feast, and wine flowed from every fountain, and all went late to bed. But Bishop Pango was troubled by a dream and could not sleep, so he rose, and dressed himself as a poor priest and let himself out by a side door, and walked down by the river below St Valia.
At the water’s edge one came walking towards him, leading a great horse, wearing a sword at his belt and bearing a musket on his shoulder.
The Bishop said, ‘Where do you go, my son, carrying these weapons of war, now that Varina is at peace?’
The man answered, ‘These are gifts I had from Bishop Pango to fight the Turk. I would return them to him now that the Turks are gone.’1
By that the Bishop knew that he spoke to Restaur Vax, whom he thought to be far off in Rome. And he was troubled, for under the terms of peace agreed among the Princes of the World, Restaur Vax must not set foot in Varina, for the Turk could then also return and take away his Princedom. Nevertheless, knowing what debt Varina owed to the hero, he, Bishop Pango, knelt by the waterside and asked for a blessing.
Restaur Vax said, ‘My blessing is on you and all Varina, until the Turks return. See that my horse is well fed, and lodge my gun and my sword among your rafters. But when you have need of me, let my horse be led forth and saddled, and my sword strapped to the pommel. Then fire my gun three times into the air, and I will return.’2
Then he raised Bishop Pango to his feet and kissed him on both cheeks and put the sword and the musket and the reins into his hands, and vanished.
By this Bishop Pango knew that he had seen only the shadow of the hero, and that Restaur Vax himself was dead, far off in Rome, across the sea. And within a week came a messenger with news that it was so.3
1 Under the Treaty of Milan, Varina was given full self-government, but remained technically part of the Turkish Empire until 1868, when the suzerainty was transferred to the Austrian Empire. A Vizier was appointed by Byzantium to ‘advise’ the Prince-Bishop, but his duties were purely ceremonial.
2 Edward Lear, who made a sketching trip through Varina in 1873, records seeing four separate skeletons of Restaur Vax’s horse, with the same legend attached to each of them.
3 This is perhaps the most popular of all Varinian legends. Nevertheless its chronology is completely mistaken. Pango was enthroned as Prince-Bishop on St Joseph’s Day, 27 August 1828, shortly after the Treaty of Milan. He died in 1850. Restaur Vax lived until 1865. His widow brought his body for burial in the family grave at Talosh when the Austrian Empire assumed hegemony of Varina in 1868.
SEPTEMBER 1991
LETTA WAS STARING out of the window of what used to be Grandad’s room, and was now going to be hers. When he’d left for Varina she had come up here once a week to dust and sweep and air, so that if he came back he could move straight in. She’d known in her heart that he wasn’t coming back, but it had been a sort of magic, a way of looking after him, as if, by pretending that one day he would come back, he had to stay alive for it to be true. Even now, when the magic hadn’t worked, she was glad that she’d done it.
Almost as soon as the news had come she’d asked Momma, not knowing how to put it without hurting, if she could move up here, and Momma had seemed pleased and said, ‘Yes, of course. He’d like that.’
She’d begun by clearing a lot of Grandad’s books into boxes, not anything in Field or Formal, and not the battered old Wordsworths and Walter Scotts he’d used to teach himself English, but the political ones and the ones in languages she couldn’t read. She’d worked steadily until the thought came to her that school was starting tomorrow, and that meant it must be exactly a year since she’d sat here talking about whether he had to go back to Varina. A wave of sadness washed through her at the thought that she would never see him again, so she stopped sorting and stood by the window, not really crying but seeing the roofs and the tree-tops mistily.
It was all right, she told herself. He’d said he wanted to die in Varina. She didn’t mind that the Romanians had said they couldn’t all go out to the funeral. Horrible Otto Vasa was sure to have hijacked it, of course, and even if he hadn’t, it would still have been a great public thing, a nation mourning its hero. It would all have been about Restaur Vax, not Grandad. Grandad was crumpets oozing with butter. He was a boy who had stared out of a schoolroom window, hating Past Conditional Optatives. He was an outlaw who’d slipped down from the hills by night to hold his almost unknown daughter on his lap. The hero was a sort of shadow. Grandad was the solid, living person who had cast the shadow. He was what mattered.
Someone on the stairs! But there was no-one in the house! Then she heard the uneven tread, climb and drag, climb and drag, and her fright changed to a different kind of tension. Things had never been right between her and Van since the accident. For a few days she’d managed to avoid any questions by always visiting him at the same time as Momma, but then there’d come a visit when she’d known at once that something was badly wrong, and he’d practically ordered Momma to go and talk to the Sister about something and as soon as she was out of earshot he’d said, ‘I’ve had a card from a chap called Andrei – friend of Otto’s. It had a lot of red roses on it. He asked me whether they were the right colour. What’s up? You sent me this.’
He held up her card with its field of yellow daisies. She’d gulped, though she’d known it was bound to happen sooner or later.
‘I’m sorry,�
� she’d said. ‘I didn’t want you to worry.’
‘You lied to me.’
‘I thought I’d better.’
‘None of your business, Sis. So what happened?’
‘We went out to the garage. Your clothes and books were there OK, but there was nothing in the secret compartments.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t see it. How on earth could that have happened? I hadn’t taken my eyes off the machine. I’d slept with it, even . . .’
‘I suppose somebody could have been following you and seen the accident.’
He’d thought about it, and nodded.
‘You told Hector red, I suppose,’ he’d said. ‘I haven’t had a squeak out of him, you know . . . Well, don’t lie to me again, Sis. It’s not up to you to decide what’s good for me, see?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she’d said, miserably, feeling the new lie inside her, like vomit she had to keep down. The feeling was still there now, after a whole year. There seemed to be no way she could tell him, and she wouldn’t get rid of it until she had. She wiped her eyes, turned and waited till he put his head round the door.
‘Moving in?’ he said with a sharp smile.
‘Do you mind? Momma said it was OK. In fact, she said it was a good idea.’
He nodded and limped across to look at the half-empty book-shelves.
‘No,’ he said, harshly. ‘It’s all yours. I’m not stepping into the old boy’s shoes.’
He turned and looked at her with the same hard, angry smile.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me where I’ve been?’ he said.
She hadn’t been meaning to. When Van had simply disappeared, in the middle of a physiotherapy course for his foot, they’d all guessed that he was trying to get to Grandad’s funeral, whether the Romanians let him or not. He couldn’t have done it alone. He’d have had to ask Otto Vasa for help, and if it wasn’t for Otto Vasa Grandad might very well still be alive. While half of what used to be Yugoslavia boiled into war close by, Grandad had gone back to Varina to try to prevent the same thing happening there, but Otto Vasa kept on stirring things up. Grandad was tired, and old, and his doctors kept telling him to rest, but he hadn’t been able to. And then, twelve days ago, the man Grandad used to call his policeman had rung Momma in the evening to say that Grandad was dead. That was all he knew.
Whatever Van thought about politics, he must have known what Momma and the rest of the family would feel about his having anything to do with Otto Vasa. Now he was pretty well forcing Letta to talk about it.
‘Varina, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Or didn’t they let you in? Or did they throw you out again?’
‘Not exactly. They didn’t let me in, but I went. They didn’t throw me out, but I left. Do you want to know?’
‘Do you want to tell me?’
He lowered himself into Grandad’s chair, leaning on his stick and moving with care. She could see his foot must be quite a bit worse than it had been when he’d left.
‘Not much,’ he said, ‘but I’d better. You’re the right person. OK. When those bastards in Bucharest told us we couldn’t attend the old boy’s funeral – not even his own daughter, for God’s sake! – I said the hell with them – I’m going. I called Otto’s office in Vienna and talked to a bloke called Andrei and said they’d got to get me through to Potok, somehow. Andrei’s a slimy little turd. He’s spent the whole of the last year doing his best to see I don’t have any contact with Otto, and of course he tried to put me off, but I told him I was coming anyway, and when I got to Vienna he was all smiles and couldn’t do enough for me. He said there was no question of the Romanians giving me a visa and they’d have to smuggle me in.’
‘That sounds pretty romantic.’
‘Just what I thought, but it wasn’t, it was just uncomfortable. We went in one of Otto’s cars, a big Merc. There were four of us, the driver, Andrei, a grinning thug called Jagu, and me. When we got to a frontier we just hoicked up the back seat-cushion and I curled up in a special compartment underneath. It had an odd smell, mechanical, but not motor car mechanical. It took me a bit of time to place it, and then I remembered. Light oil and graphite. Know what that means, Sis?’
‘No.’
‘Guns . . . You don’t look surprised.’
‘Not really. Were you?’
‘No. Look, Sis – I’ve got something to explain. You remember those packages I asked you to look for in my bike after my accident, only they weren’t there?’
Letta didn’t hesitate. She looked him in the eyes and said, ‘They were there, actually. I gave them to Grandad. They were a bomb, weren’t they?’
He stared at her. The knuckles of the hand which was holding his stick went white.
‘I did it for Varina,’ she said.
‘So did we all,’ he snapped. ‘God! If I’d known . . . So you lied to me twice, Sis?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
She waited, watching him think the thing through. He shook his head and shrugged.
‘Leaves a nasty taste, doesn’t it?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it’s turned out all right, somehow. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked you in the first place. Let’s call it quits. Where were we? Yes, it was about that. These people, Andrei and the others, they’ve got a way of cornering you. They sort of nudge you into a position where you’re doing things you’re not at all sure you want to, only there doesn’t seem any way out unless you’re going to make things worse for something you really care about. That was what happened then. I didn’t like it at all. And all the way, while we were heading south in the Merc I began to feel more and more that the same sort of thing was happening again. There was something up between Andrei and Jagu, a joke they knew about and I didn’t. And my foot was hurting – I’d had to do a lot more tramping around on my way out than it’s used to, and Jagu kept offering to carry me, as if I were a baby. Not much fun.
‘Anyway, we finished up jolting along over what weren’t much more than mule-tracks to reach Otto’s place without actually going through Potok. He’s managed to install himself in the Prince-Bishop’s summer palace. It’s up in the hills, a couple of miles south of Potok. The Communist bosses had had it as a perk, so it’s been looked after. In fact it’s pretty luxurious. Otto was there, very friendly as always, and very sympathetic about my foot. He said he was planning a big rally in honour of Grandad the evening before the funeral, and he wanted me to speak about the old boy, as a representative of the family, and I’d got to keep under cover till then in case somebody spotted me and I got thrown out. I didn’t like that at all. Two whole days. I’ve got friends in Potok I wanted to see. I wanted to know what was going on, what people really thought. I didn’t get a chance to object because at that point he was called away and sent a message back saying he wouldn’t be around till the evening.
‘There must have been some sort of a crisis on, because everyone was scurrying about, only that grinning oaf Jagu stuck to me like a limpet until, mainly to get rid of him, I said I was tired and my foot was hurting and I was going to go and lie down. He said OK, and took me up to my room and told me to stay there, and then, do you know what the bastard did? He went out and locked the door! That was the final straw. I wouldn’t have taken it from Otto, and I certainly wasn’t going to from a jerk like Jagu.
‘It was a pretty stupid thing to do anyway, because it wasn’t that sort of lock. I mean, it was to keep people out, not in. It was just screwed to the inside of the door, and the bolt went into a bracket which was screwed on too. All I had to do was unscrew the bracket with my penknife. By that time the bustle had died down. I’d heard several cars leaving.
‘I wasn’t running away. There was no way I could have made it into Potok without transport. I just wanted to show myself, and them, that I wasn’t going to be treated like that. I was thirsty, so I decided to find myself a drink and headed for the kitchens. There seemed to be no-one around. I didn’t like t
he smell of the tap-water and I was looking for something else when a couple of maids appeared. They’d heard my stick on the stone floor, they said. Anyway, they knew who I was from seeing me at Otto’s rallies when I’d been there before and they rushed over and started sobbing about Grandad, and what a fine man he’d been, and how much the country was going to miss him, and how frightened everyone was about what might happen without him.’
‘Really? In Otto Vasa’s house? They were saying that?’
‘They were just a couple of serving-maids hired from the town. They weren’t Otto’s people. But yes, I was surprised too. One of them said she had two sisters in the western province, and she knew all about what was happening up in Croatia, and she was scared stiff that it might start happening where her sisters were if the Serbs were given the slightest excuse to start ethnic cleansing around there.
‘Then they looked at each other and I could see they were frightened at what they’d been saying and they changed the subject and talked about last year’s festival. One of them said I’d met her cousin then, and – you know how everyone in Potok is related to everyone else and they all seem to know each other? – it turned out the cousin was one of the people I wanted to see, so I asked her to give him my love and say I hoped to see him after the rally, but could he keep quiet about me being there till then.
‘Then we heard a car come back. It was a false alarm, actually, but they were obviously scared of losing their jobs if they were found talking to me, and my foot had begun to act up again, so they found me some mineral water and I went back to my room and screwed the door shut and took a couple of Codeine and lay down, and – you know, this is very odd, but almost for the first time since I’d got to Vienna I began to feel happy about what I was doing. I felt in control of my life again. I lay on my bed, thinking about the two girls, and how ordinary and real they had seemed, and how much more they mattered to me than creeps like Andrei and Jagu. And then I managed to have a nap.
‘Well, not much else happened that day. Otto came back and about half a dozen of us had supper together and he was full of his big, vague ideas about Varina claiming its proper place in the world – he asked if I wanted to be UN Representative, and it wasn’t a joke. And he talked quite a bit about what a mistake it had been, giving in to the Bulgarians over the Listru festival, but of course my grandfather had been a sick man by then. In the old days, when he’d had real fire in his belly, et cetera, et cetera . . . And all the while I could feel the others watching me to see how I took it. Ah, well . . .
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